Smooth jazz

Drug addiction has contributed to a large portion of cultural foundations in The United States. Throughout the decades, the use of drugs has sculpted the principals of life in a majority of all ethnic backgrounds. “Sonny’s Blues”, written by James Baldwin, conveys a first person view of the effects of drug addiction and the recovery processes power to bring family back together after an immense amount of hardship. Throughout “Sonny’s Blues”, Sonny has been released from jail and is dealing with…

West African musical influences can be found throughout the rest of Africa and across the globe. These influences can be found throughout various genres of music, including jazz, blues, and electronic music. A modern example I discovered that demonstrates West African musical styles was M83’s Midnight City, an electronic song. Firstly, and prominently featured throughout the song is the synth pattern, or ostinato that is repeated through a large majority of the song. It is a simple four note…

In ‘Respect’ there are many different musical lines that bring together the piece. In the intro of the song it is just the brass, guitar, and drums playing for four measures until Aretha Franklin starts singing. The back-up singers and the piano’s entrance is about a half of a beat after Aretha’s entrance. At this point all of the instruments are in full swing. The brass has a solo about half way through the song; the saxophone having the melody and the trombone and trumpets playing the harmony.…

record-buyers after 1920, and the emigration of black Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Many of the earliest black American recording stars were blues singers. The first blues songs to be recorded, often called “classic blues,” were jazz-influenced songs in a vaudeville style, sung by the great blueswomen: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others. These singers were often accompanied by pianists,…

Defending Jazz As African-American artists, LeRoi Jones, poet, playwright, and jazz critic, and Max Roach, drummer and jazz lecturer, believe that jazz is a representation of African-American culture and attitudes about the world. More importantly, they believe that the creation of jazz music is reserved for only African-Americans. This is evident when Roach says in his essay, “Beyond Categories”: “I am often asked, ‘Can whites play your kind of music?’ My answer is ‘Yes’...But no whites have…

The form of “jazz dancing” has altered a lot over the last several decades, much like the rest of American Musical Theatre. Choreographers like Steven Hoggett (Once) and Andy Blankenbuehler (Hamilton) have taken their new conceptual ideas and formed them into dance styles that are now being seen in musicals around the world. However, the classic names of Broadway like Jerome Robbins, Michael Bennett, Bob Fosse and Agnes De Mille have left their mark on the world of Musical Theatre dance forever.…

Jess Anderson English X-8 Ms. Landon 18 October 2017 Short Story Paper “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin is a story about the Narrator’s younger brother Sonny’s struggles with drug addiction while growing up in Harlem. The story starts off with the narrator discovering that Sonny has been caught using drugs and imprisoned. After being released and returning to harlem Sonny begins to use the piano as a way to cope with his suffering. This causes a rift between the brothers because the Narrator…

In the article, “Cracking Code Purple” by Anna Ouchchy, the discussion of the author about breaking codes contributes to the readers understanding Grotjan skills. The way that the code breaking is described, it sounds like the code was very hard to understand and do. Because, if one got a code that is like thgnbe svsikdk it could mean thank you. With every code they were different and it must have been very very hard to understand. Therefore, the discussion of the author about code breaking…

A Raisin in the sun by Lorraine Hansberry. In this essay I’m going to talked about their characters and their American dreams. Do their dreams coming true? This play about the younger, a poor African American family living in south side of Chicago. They all have dreams. In this Novel, Mama Beneatha and walter are dreaming about a happy and lived better life in future. This whole family struggling against racism they are living in small apartment where they have two bedroom and one bathroom.…

Coleman was a jazz saxophone player who started his career in the 1950s by defying cultural, and musical standards. David Ake, composer, performer, and musicologist, analysed how Ornette Coleman created dramatic change in the jazz realm by defying the bebop era standards. Ake brings up many points of the standards that Coleman defied, such as: jazz virtuosity and masculinity, jazz performance and sex, and cultural perceptions of masculinity and race. David Ake points out how jazz music gave a…